Generally, there are two types of tennis balls, a pressurized type and a non-pressurized type. The former is produced from cores made of natural or synthetic rubbers, and its core is filled with air or a gas of 0.6 to 0.9 kg/cm.sup.2 higher than atmospheric pressure. The latter is also produced from cores made of natural or synthetic rubbers, and its core is filled with air at atmospheric pressure.
The above pressurized type tennis ball is generally produced from a core for tennis balls obtained by blending a rubber composition, as obtained from natural or high cis-polybutadiene rubbers, with commonly used fillers such as clay, calcium carbonate, etc., and then vulcanizing the resulting blend.
Since a rigid tennis ball must meet the International Tennis Federation's standard (ITF standard), its weight, outside diameter, rebound height (hereinafter referred to as impact resilience) and deformation are limited. When pressurized type tennis balls are produced with rubber compositions obtained from natural or high cis-polybutadiene rubbers, the tennis ball has good impact resilience but is poor compression. Improvement of this defect by using large amounts of a vulcanizing agent such as sulfur, etc., brings about a reduction in the physical property of rubber, thus reducing the durability of the ball as well as increasing the change with time of the ball during playing as a result of which the ball may be punctured. Increasing the amount of filler in order to obtain a proper compression increases the weight of the ball so as to make it impossible to meet the ITF standard. Adding a filler having a strong reinforcing effect such as carbon, etc. undesirably reduces the impact resilience.
In order to develop rigidness, adding SBR or a high styrene resin to the rubber composition is contemplated, but this method undesirably reduces the impact resilience although a proper compression is obtained by adding small amounts of a filler.